UMG ALPHA
At Universal Music Group, I helped improve ALPHA, an internal platform used by label teams to manage music release workflows. What started as a Timeline feature project grew into a broader UX effort around adoption, workflow clarity, and product feedback. Through research, mockups, workshops, and synthesis, I helped surface user needs and turn complex internal workflows into clearer product opportunities.
Product Design
UX Research
Change Adoption
What is ALPHA?
ALPHA is an internal UMG platform that helps label teams manage music project workflows, assets, timelines, and cross-functional collaboration.
Music releases involve many moving parts — artists, marketing, creative, production, legal, operations, and label teams. As an internal platform, ALPHA helped centralize this complexity while protecting sensitive release information.
Timeline
The Initial Challenge: Timeline Feature
For our capstone project, the problem we are addressing is:
ALPHA’s Timeline view was intended to centralize release planning, but users found it confusing and difficult to trust, leading teams to rely on external tools instead.
During the capstone phase, I led the project as both project manager and UX research lead. I coordinated meetings, stakeholder check-ins, and interviews, kept the team on track, and guided teammates through UX research, synthesis, and product recommendation development.
Previous Timeline View
Research Approach
Stakeholder Interviews
We talked to 8 label users and internal marketing team stakeholders who currently use ALPHA, to understand how teams currently planned, tracked, and communicated around music projects.
Pain Points
The Timeline view was difficult for users to understand at a glance.
Users were unsure how the information mapped to their real release planning process.
Teams relied on external tools because they felt more familiar or easier to manage.
Timeline data needed to feel clearer, more reliable, and more actionable.
The feature needed to support real work habits.
Competitive Research
Key Takeaways
Highly customizable: Users need flexibility to shape timelines around different team workflows.
Task-centered: Strong timeline tools allow users to add, adjust, and track tasks directly.
Visually clear and shareable: Timelines should be easy to scan, present, and share across teams.
Multiple views: Users benefit from switching between timeline, table, board, and list views depending on the task.
Design Suggestion
I designed a Timeline prototype that made release planning more flexible, visual, and actionable.
List + calendar views to support both detailed tracking and high-level planning
Add/edit timeline items with date, status, department, type, region, and assignee fields
Color-coded milestones to make key release moments easier to scan
Multi-day event bars to show longer production or campaign tasks
Export option to support sharing across teams
Beyond the Prototype
Our team presented the project to UMG’s global technology department, including the CIO. Following the capstone, my contract was extended to continue supporting the ALPHA team. While I’m not able to show the current published Timeline design, this work helped move the conversation beyond a concept prototype and into real product discussions around timeline clarity, workflow fit, and feature adoption.
What this influenced
Transition: Feature UX to Change Adoption
After the capstone project, I continued supporting the ALPHA UX team and began seeing the problem from a broader perspective. My work expanded from feature design into product adoption. I supported ALPHA’s rollout for Interscope Capitol, helping label teams understand how the platform fit into their day-to-day release workflows.
What is Interscope Capitol?
The Adoption Challenge
For Interscope Capitol, the challenge was not just introducing ALPHA, but helping label teams understand, trust, and adopt it as part of their daily music release workflow.
Many users were used to existing tools and habits, so successful adoption required more than training.
It required clear communication, hands-on support, and a feedback loop between label teams and the ALPHA product team.
My Role
Existing Pain Points
Before supporting ALPHA adoption, I first looked at the tools and pain points already shaping Interscope Capitol’s marketing operations workflow.
They were working across a crowded tool landscape for planning, communication, collaboration, and asset sharing.
This created friction around visibility, ownership, and where key information should live, therefore revealing an opportunity for ALPHA to become a more centralized source of truth.
However, introducing ALPHA was not just a product rollout. Because teams already had established tools and habits, adoption required communication, training, workshops, and feedback loops to help users build trust in the platform.
Adoption Strategy & Process
ALPHA adoption was treated as a continuous loop, where demos, user support, feedback, and product improvements informed each other over time.
What We Learned
Adoption needed to happen one feature at a time
Asset sharing was the strongest starting point
Users wanted more structure through templates
Users wanted automation & AI to reduce manual work
Permissions settings to match real collaboration needs
Through adoption sessions with Interscope Capitol, we learned that rollout for each label is different. Despite these requests, many needs were already supported by ALPHA. This showed adoption depended as much on discoverability and communication.
Adoption Touchpoints
Through workshop materials, feedback synthesis, and office-hour notes, I helped introduce ALPHA workflows, capture real-time adoption friction, and translate recurring user questions into opportunities for clearer guidance and product improvements.
Outcome & Impact
Adoption feedback became a continuous input for product improvement, helping the ALPHA team understand where users needed support, clarity, and stronger feature discoverability.
Key Insights & Reflections
Designing for adoption means designing beyond the interface
ALPHA taught me that product rollout is part of the user experience. This was my first introduction to change management, and I saw how closely it connects to UX.
User confusion can become product direction
Repeated user questions revealed gaps in clarity, discoverability, and workflow fit, turning adoption friction into product improvement opportunities.This project expanded how I think about UX impact
What began as a Timeline redesign grew into broader product and adoption work, helping me see UX as a system of people, tools, and organizational change.
ALPHA was one of several projects I contributed to during my time at UMG, where I worked across product design, UX research, change adoption, usability testing, and project management.
Feel free to reach out! I would love to share more about these projects in a conversation!
